6 Quotes by Oliver Bullough

He realized that trust between people is what makes us happy. Any totalitarian state is based on betrayal. It needs people to inform on each other, to avoid socializing to interact only through the state and to avoid unsanctioned meetings.

Prosperity and democracy does seem to be a good way to wean a population off massive alcohol abuse.

The Soviet state was, in fact, almost perfectly designed to make people unhappy. It denied its citizens not just hope, but also trust. Every activity had to be sanctioned by the state. Any person could be an informant. No action could be guaranteed to be without consequence. Father Dmitry preached friendship and warmth and belief to his parishioners, and inspired a generation to live as humans and not as parts of a machine.

Russians consider themselves civilized Europeans, but have to endure the humiliation of daily encounters with officials that belong in a squalid dictatorship.

[Father Dmitry] “lived through collectivization, the crushing of the 80 percent of Russians that were peasants. He served as a soldier in World War Two, when millions of peasants died defending the government that had crushed them. He spent eight years in the gulag, the network of labour camps created to break the spirit of anyone who still resisted. He rose again to speak out for his parishioners in the 1960’s and 1970’s, striving to help young Russians create a freer and fairer society.

As with almost all the troubling aspects of Moneyland, this near-impossibility of retrieving assets once they have vanished offshore is driven by the basic rule that money can travel where it wishes, while law enforcement stops at a country’s borders.